Modern consumer and industrial electronics, such as computing systems, servers, appliances, televisions, cellular phones, automobiles, satellites, and combination devices, are providing increasing levels of functionality to support modern life. While the performance requirements can differ between consumer products and enterprise or commercial products, there is a common need for more performance while reducing power consumption.
Research and development in the existing technologies can take a myriad of different directions. Caching is one mechanism employed to improve performance. Prefetching is another mechanism used to help populate the cache. However, prefetching is costly in memory cycle and power consumption.
Thus, a need still remains for a computing system with prefetch mechanism for improved processing performance while reducing power consumption through increased efficiency. In view of the ever-increasing commercial competitive pressures, along with growing consumer expectations and the diminishing opportunities for meaningful product differentiation in the marketplace, it is increasingly critical that answers be found to these problems. Additionally, the need to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and performance, and meet competitive pressures adds an even greater urgency to the critical necessity for finding answers to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.